Richard Murray

Professor, California Institute of Technology

Dr. Richard M. Murray is the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. In 1998-99, Professor Murray took a sabbatical leave and served as the Director of Mechatronic Systems at the United Technologies Research Center in Hartford, CT. Upon returning to Caltech, Murray served as the Division Chair (dean) of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech from 2000-2005, the Director for Information Science and Technology (IST) from 2006-2009, and interim Division Chair from 2008-2009. Murray served on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board from 2002-2006 and has served on advisory committees for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Murray is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (2013) and the recipient of the 2017 IEEE Control Systems Award.

Murray's research is in the application of feedback and control to networked systems, with applications in autonomy and biology. His work in autonomous vehicles include advances in nonlinear control theory that exploit geometric structure for real-time, optimization-based trajectory generation and tracking, as well as analysis and design of cooperative and consensus-based control systems for networked, multi-agent systems. Murray served as the faculty lead for Caltech’s teams in the 2004, 2005 and 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge competitions, including the development of two autonomous vehicles (Bob and Alice) capable of autonomous navigation in desert and urban environments. Murray’s group has also developed computationally tractable approaches for synthesis of reactive control protocols applicable to control systems in which the decision-making logic satisfies safety, fairness, and reactivity constraints. Current projects include synthesis of discrete decision-making protocols for reactive systems, design of highly resilient architectures for autonomous systems, and design of biomolecular feedback circuits (synthetic biology).